Infotypes are also called information types and are pre-defined templates to enter sensible related information for an employee or applicant. for eg an address infotype would have fields like street & house no, city, pin code.This infotype is unique and is represented by an infotype number eg address has infotype no 0006.
There other infotypes like
0000 - Actions (to capture employee movement info in the orgnization)
0001 - Organizational Assignment (to capture employee positioning in the organization)
0002 - Personal Data
0006 - Address
0007 - Planned Working Time (Store planned working hours for the employee.)
0008 - Basic Salary
0009 - Bank Details
0014 - Recurring Payment
0015 - Additional payment
0016 - Contract Elements
2006 - Absence Quotas
The above infotypes together in the same sequence form a part of the Hiring Action.To make you understand this better just try and recollect the contents of your offer letter which your organization might have given you. It would possibly read “We are delighted to offer you the position (IT 0001) of ______. You will belong to ______ department (IT 0001). Your joining date will be ______(IT0000 or IT0041)and you will be paid a salary of ______ (IT 0008). You will be paid monthly allowances ______ (IT 0008 or IT 0014) and we are also offering you a joining bonus of ______ (IT 0015). You will be eligible for annual leave of ______ days (IT 2006) and sick leave of ______ (IT 2006).You will be on a probation for six months from the date of joining (probation date & confirmation date in IT0016). Your working hours will be from ____ hrs to ____ hrs beginning Monday to Friday (IT 0007) and we look forward to your presence on date ______(IT 0016)……
I hope this gives you some idea of what an infotype is.
This must have raised a question in many minds that “Hey ! I got the offer during my recruitment so how come this is being referred to after hiring?” Well thats simple - this is because all your relevant data that was captured during recruitment was transferred to the the master (called HR master data)during the hiring process.
So how was it captured in recruitment?
Well, this was captured using recruitment actions like shortlist candidate, for interview, make offer, offer accepted till you join the organization and sign the joining letter when your data actually gets transferred from the Recruitment module to the Personnel Administration module.
Again this data was captured in recruitment infotypes.
So we can now get an idea that in SAP HR ,all data is captured in infotypes.
http://saphrexpert.blogspot.com/2008/12/infotypes-basics.html